Built by Slingshot Cycles in Virginia, this CX500 was a pretty radical bike given what they started with. If you don’t know, these Hondas are pretty odd. Water cooled, shafty, slow, ugly. But as you can see, it turned out great!

They swapped the Custom tank for a Standard model tank. Modified the exhaust, changed the jets, put on some clip ons and made a bump seat from a CB360 fuel tank. Then they shot it with some bright ass red and clear.

The story of this bike begins a couple years ago with a guy called Wayne. Wayne lived well up north in Minnesota near the Canadian border. That’s where he bought this Honda CB250 at a local antique store for an untold sum of money. You see, the Honda CB250 is actually a Canadian bike. That we know of, Honda never sold them here in The States. Sure, we had its big brother, the CB/CL350, but the CB250 was off limits for reasons we still don’t understand. Wayne found one, however, and he had a particular purpose in mind. He needed to get to the Twin Cities to see about a lady. In our estimation, it doesn’t get much more romantic than that. Buy a weird old motorcycle, travel hundreds of miles and try to sweep a young lady off her feet. Sadly, Wayne’s trip hadn’t gone quite according to plan by the time he and his CB250 darkened our shop door.

Honda’s CB1000R is coming to the US this year. “When Honda discontinued the 919 in 2007 (known as the Hornet 900 across the Atlantic), Europeans saw the gap filled with the higher-performance and futuristically styled CB1000R for the 2008 model year, but the machine failed to make it into North America.” Looks like Honda is bringing it to the US this year.